Dedicated Host (DDH) is a single-tenant hosting solution from Alibaba Cloud. A Dedicated Host is a physical server whose compute resources -- sockets, physical CPU cores, and memory -- are exclusively yours. No other tenant's workloads run on the same physical machine.
Benefits
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Security and compliance: Your workloads run in physical isolation from other tenants. This helps you meet regulatory and compliance requirements that mandate single-tenant infrastructure.
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Bring Your Own License (BYOL): Use your existing per-socket, per-core, or per-VM software licenses on Dedicated Hosts. This applies to licenses for software such as Windows Server, SQL Server, and other enterprise applications that require visibility into the underlying hardware.
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Cost optimization: DDH helps you migrate your workloads to the cloud at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). You can reuse your existing software licenses on Dedicated Hosts instead of purchasing new cloud licenses.
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Visibility and control: You can view the physical attributes of the host, including the number of sockets, physical CPU cores, and memory size. You choose which Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance families to deploy on the host.
The following figure shows the differences between Dedicated Hosts and shared hosts.
On a shared host, multiple tenants share the same physical server. On a Dedicated Host, you are the sole tenant and have exclusive access to all physical resources.
When to use Dedicated Host
| Scenario | Description |
|---|---|
| Regulatory compliance | Your industry or data governance framework requires workloads to run on dedicated physical infrastructure not shared with other organizations. |
| License optimization | You own per-socket or per-core software licenses and want to bring them to the cloud (BYOL) without purchasing additional licenses. |
| Performance-sensitive workloads | You need consistent performance without the possibility of noisy-neighbor interference from other tenants. |
| Hardware affinity | Your applications require persistent binding to specific physical hosts, for example, for license tracking or audit purposes. |
For more information, see Common scenarios.
Features
DDH provides the following deployment features:
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Automatic deployment | When you create an ECS instance, DDH automatically selects a host with sufficient resources to place the instance. |
| Host association | You can bind an ECS instance to a specific Dedicated Host. This is applicable to instances that have enabled the economical mode. Even if the instance is stopped, it is deployed on the original Dedicated Host when restarted. |
For more information, see Functions and features.
Dedicated host types
Each Dedicated Host type defines the physical resources available to you: the number of sockets, physical CPU cores, and memory size. Based on these resources, you can create ECS instances of specified instance families.
For the full list of available types, see Dedicated host types.
Billing
When you use a Dedicated Host, take note of the following billing information:
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Dedicated Host: The subscription and pay-as-you-go billing methods are available. For pricing details, go to the Dedicated Host tab in the Pricing section of the Elastic Compute Service product page.
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ECS instances on the host: The billing method depends on the resource type. For more information, see Resource billing for ECS instances on a dedicated host.
For more information about DDH billing, see Billing overview.
Related services
ECS instances created on a Dedicated Host support the same Alibaba Cloud services as ECS instances on shared hosts. However, certain features differ between the two environments. For details, see Differences between ECS instances on a dedicated host and those on a shared host.
For general information about ECS, see What is ECS?
Limits
DDH has resource limits. For details, see Limits.
Get started
You can create a Dedicated Host from the ECS console. For instructions, see Create a dedicated host.
After you create a Dedicated Host, you can: